veri blog

Africa’s green bond market is moving from isolated sovereign firsts to a structured, multi-issuer ecosystem — and the infrastructure to track and benchmark it must match the pace. In the first quarter of 2026, global green bond issuance reached $168.39 billion, continuing the structural growth of a market that has established itself as a permanent feature of the international fixed-income landscape. Africa’s share of that total remains below 1 per cent. The gap between the co

South Africa’s formal Afreximbank membership closes the continent’s most significant multilateral finance gap and commits $8 billion to industrial, trade, and transformation priorities. On 4 February 2026, at a formal ceremony attended by President Cyril Ramaphosa and Afreximbank President Dr George Elombi, the Republic of South Africa officially acceded to the Establishment Agreement of the African Export-Import Bank, becoming the 54th state to join Africa’s leading multilat

Canal+’s historic JSE listing is the clearest statement yet that Africa’s largest exchange has reached the international standing that demands institutional-grade indexation to match. On 3 June 2026, Canal+, the global media and entertainment company that completed its acquisition of MultiChoice in 2024, will conduct a secondary inward listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The listing — which awaits final JSE approval confirmed as imminent at the time of writing — will

Africa’s $2 trillion in pension and sovereign wealth assets has crossed from mobilisation into execution — and the infrastructure to deploy it rigorously is the defining requirement of this moment. In February 2026, more than 200 institutional investors gathered in Mauritius for the ninth edition of the Pension Funds and Alternative Investments Africa summit — PI Africa 2026. The theme was ‘Empowering Africa’s Institutional Capital for Growth and Development’, and the backdro

Nigeria’s $5 billion total return swap is the continent’s clearest signal yet that African sovereign financing is evolving faster than the infrastructure designed to track it. On 24 March 2026, President Bola Tinubu submitted a request to Nigeria’s National Assembly for approval of a $5 billion external borrowing programme structured as a total return swap with First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest lender in the United Arab Emirates. By 31 March — seven days later — both chambers

AfCRA is not about giving Africa better ratings — it is about giving Africa accurate ones, built from data that reflects the continent’s real economic structure. In February 2025, at the 37th Ordinary Summit of the African Union in Addis Ababa, African heads of state gave formal political endorsement to an idea that had been building for years: a continental credit rating agency, owned and operated by Africa, headquartered in Mauritius, and designed to assess African sovereig

A credible hard-currency venue in an unlikely setting is exactly the kind of development a rules-based reference architecture is built to evaluate on its merits rather than dismiss on its reputation. The received wisdom about Zimbabwean capital markets, for most of the last decade, has been straightforward: interesting to watch, difficult to size, structurally complicated by a currency environment that makes institutional engagement challenging. That wisdom has been defensibl

A continental payments rail that works is upstream of every capital-markets activity that crosses a border — and the maturation of PAPSS is exactly the kind of quiet, compounding development institutional investors should be paying closer attention to. There is a rhythm to capital-markets infrastructure stories on this continent. The announcement gets covered. The first transaction gets covered. Then there is a long, unglamorous middle period in which the system either goes o

The shift from disconnected national exposures to a connected continental market is the largest structural change allocators will absorb this decade — and AfCFTA’s trading phase is where that change starts to price. It is very easy, in capital markets, to under-weight multi-year policy projects until the moment they become tradeable — and then to over-react to them when they do. AfCFTA has been absorbed into the African narrative for a long time as a signed agreement and a sc

A broadening NGX changes the African allocation from a bet on a single anchor name to a proper portfolio — and that is exactly the kind of shift Veri’s reference architecture is built to make legible. I wrote earlier in this series that Dangote’s listing was a market story rather than a company story. That framing was deliberate. It put the reader’s attention on the exchange that had just absorbed a continental-scale megadeal, rather than on the issuer that had just brought i

An African market moving up the index-family ladder is not a category change for one country — it is a credibility export for the continent, and the kind of event indexation discipline exists to handle cleanly. The most important thing to understand about a market reclassification event is that it is not primarily about the market being reclassified. It is about what happens to everything around it when the label changes. Egypt is now close enough to a serious upward reclassi

A deep-frontier African sovereign clearing the international capital market is not a single deal — it is a precedent, and precedents are the quiet engine behind durable African capital access. Every so often a capital-markets event does not just add a data point; it quietly moves the line that defines what is investable. The DRC sovereign eurobond is one of those events. It is not a story about a single deal. It is a story about a category of sovereign that most institutional

A working derivatives venue removes the single most common structural objection to institutional African allocation — and Casablanca has just delivered one the continent can build on. There is a specific argument I have had, in variations, with global institutional allocators for most of my career. The argument runs roughly as follows. Africa, as a class, is interesting. The demographics are unarguable, the growth is real, the corporate universe is broadening. But — and the “

Rwanda is the cleanest proof on the continent that market architecture, not market size, determines relevance — and that is exactly the kind of market Veri was built to make legible. I want to make an argument this week that cuts against some instinctive allocator habits. The habit is to equate market size with market relevance. Larger market, more attention. Smaller market, less attention, or none. That habit is defensible in a world where the architecture of a market scales

Why the Ethiopia Securities Exchange is the clearest signal yet that African capital markets are running faster than the narrative around them — and why Veri was built for precisely this moment. I want to talk about Ethiopia. But to do it honestly, I have to start somewhere else. For most of my career, when I told people I spent my working life thinking about African capital markets, the response sat somewhere between polite interest and polite scepticism. The markets were sm

A USD 5 billion listing in Lagos is the first real test of whether African public markets can absorb African champions at scale — and it is exactly the kind of moment Veri was built for. A company of this scale does not list in Lagos by accident. A deal of this scale does not price in Lagos by sentiment. It prices there because the market is now credible enough, deep enough and institutionally prepared enough to carry it — and because the alternative, routing to London or New

Veri Expands into Nigeria with the Appointment of Victor Bisong as Country Partner & Director Veri is proud to announce a significant milestone in its continued growth across Africa with the appointment of Victor Bisong as Country Partner & Director for Nigeria . This strategic expansion marks an important step in Veri’s vision to build a connected, accessible, and innovative investment ecosystem across the African continent. Strengthening Our Presence in a Key Market Nigeria

As global banking systems continue to retrench and public markets struggle to meet the funding needs of growth economies, private credit has emerged as one of the most important forces reshaping capital allocation worldwide. Nowhere is this shift more pronounced than in Africa, where financing gaps remain significant across infrastructure, SMEs, and mid-market corporates. For Mauritius, this moment presents both opportunity and challenge. The jurisdiction has long been centra

Nigeria’s financial markets are adjusting to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) latest move to reform its foreign exchange regime—an effort aimed at rebuilding credibility, easing currency volatility, and unlocking investor inflows after two turbulent years. The core of the change is a redesigned FX allocation mechanism that introduces greater transparency and price discovery through market-driven auctions, replacing a patchwork of official and unofficial rates. What’s New?

After a nearly three-year hiatus from global capital markets, Ghana is preparing a potential return to the Eurobond market—a move seen as both a test of investor confidence and a marker of the country’s progress since its sovereign debt restructuring. With inflation now under 8%, a broadly stable cedi, and evidence of fiscal tightening, the Ministry of Finance has signaled readiness to re-engage external markets under more disciplined terms. The proposed issuance would be Gha